The disclosures herein relate generally to information processing systems and in particular to a computing system and method for accessing a computer-readable medium device.
A computing system may include a computer-readable medium device, such as a CD-R/RW drive. Computer programs have been created for managing the computing system's access to the computer-readable medium device. For example, in response to such programs, the computing system formats, adds, modifies or deletes information (e.g. instructions, data) on the device's computer-readable medium. Nevertheless, previous techniques of such programs are inefficient.
For accessing (e.g. recording information on) a CD-R/RW drive, one conventional technique maintains a list of supported CD-R/RW drives in a static drive table (e.g. stored in the operating system registry). The drive table includes various information about the supported CD-R/RW drives, such as a drive's identification strings, features, and command behavior (such as a response to a prevent/allow medium removal (1Eh) command). If a CD-R/RW drive is not listed in the drive table (or is listed incorrectly in the drive table), the computing system either (a) does not support the drive (e.g. operates without recognition of the drive's features) or (b) provides minimal support for the drive according to predetermined assumptions (e.g. operates with recognition of a subset of the drive's features). Even if the computing system provides minimal support for the drive, the minimal support might interfere with other software operations (e.g. due to command set incompatibilities), create errors, and fail to satisfy user expectations.
Accordingly, in order to provide full support for a CD-R/RW drive that is not listed in the drive table (or is listed incorrectly in the drive table), the drive table is updated to provide support for the CD-R/RW drive. Nevertheless, such an update is potentially inefficient, especially if restorable images (or “copies”) of software, tables and other information are saved for a customer's installation. This is because a change in the drive table results in more cost by compelling a revision to the saved restorable images. Moreover, computer manufacturers incur significant expense in creating, maintaining and updating numerous drivers (e.g. software for managing a computing system's access to drives) to support a wide variety of different CD-R/RW drives.
A need has arisen for a computing system and method for accessing a computer-readable medium device, in which various shortcomings of previous techniques are overcome. More particularly, a need has arisen for a computing system and method for accessing a computer-readable medium device, in which efficiency is increased relative to previous techniques.